Letting Go In Writing and in Life
We all have to let go eventually.
Sometimes it’s letting go of a friendship. A husband. A career. A child. A parent.
The toxic friend who suffocates you and puts you down. The husband who can’t commit. The career that stresses you out. The child who needs to learn from his own mistakes. The parent who dies.
Or letting go of the parts of your book you’re writing that work–until they don’t work anymore.
Some people call it “killing your darlings” like William Faulkner noted. He said, “in writing, you must kill all your darlings.” He also said, “a writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”
Your imagination lets your words fly free.
Your experience enables you to harness them.
Your observation arms you with the weapon to indeed kill those darlings.
I like to call it “letting go”.
At one writer’s retreat lakeside in Northern New York (led by editor, author, and friend Kathryn Craft) I read from my novel-in-progress. A strong theme of the novel is about finding peace in life through balance, emotional vs. physical. My fellow…
